absence by his having had to go to the City. While she sat there in
her usual anxious stiffness there came, at the door, a knock which I
immediately recognised as the subdued appeal of a model out of work.
It was followed by the entrance of a young man whom I easily
perceived to be a foreigner and who proved in fact an Italian
acquainted with no English word but my name, which he uttered in a
way that made it seem to include all others. I had not then visited
his country, nor was I proficient in his tongue; but as he was not so
meanly constituted--what Italian is?--as to depend only on that
member for expression he conveyed to me, in familiar but graceful
mimicry, that he was in search of exactly the employment in which the
lady before me was engaged. I was not struck with him at first, and
while I continued to draw I emitted rough sounds of discouragement
and dismissal. He stood his ground, however, not importunately, but
with a dumb, dog-like fidelity in his eyes which amounted to innocent
impudence--the manner of a devoted servant (he might have been in the
house for years), unjustly suspected. Suddenly I saw that this very
attitude and expression made a picture, whereupon I told him to sit
down and wait till I should be free. There was another picture in
the way he obeyed me, and I observed as I worked that there were
others still in the way he looked wonderingly, with his head thrown
back, about the high studio. He might have been crossing himself in
St. Peter's. Before I finished I said to myself: "The fellow's a
bankrupt orange-monger, but he's a treasure."

When Mrs. Monarch withdrew he passed across the room like a flash to
open the door for her, standing there with the rapt, pure gaze of the
young Dante spellbound by the young Beatrice. As I never insisted,
in such situations, on the blankness of the British domestic, I
reflected that he had the making of a servant (and I needed one, but